Blog

Some more mini big skies heading to the Biscuit Factory in Newcastle. Ten brand spanking new paintings all inspired by the ever changing weather up here in the North of England. Each one is finished with a bespoke St Ives style frame which has been hand painted with Little Green Slaked Lime.

In January 2021 lockdown was creating havoc with my schedule and I would find that I wouldn’t leave the house for 3-4 days and be constantly glued to my computer screen. I decided I needed another project which would give me some structure and this coincided with the start of the 100 day project which was running on Instagram.

This is an original oil and cold wax landscape painting which you can see me create from start to finish. It was a little bit tricky as there was a gap of a week between me starting and finishing the painting so how it started out was very different to how it ended up.

I have absolutely loved being back in the studio painting and this time I have been experimenting with scale and surface. For the last 3 years I have been mainly painting with cold wax on a smaller scale and on paper. I love working on the paper but you can only scale up so far with work that has to be behind glass, unless of course you fix the paper to the board and well I know that will just go terribly wrong for me. 

Remember these? Well I have at last got a title for them which sums them up perfectly... The Gloaming... sounds a little like some corny horror movie but I think it sums these paintings up perfectly. 

You've probably realised by now that I do like to paint dark foreboding skies (AKA Clouds of Doom!) with dramatic contrasts between light and dark colours. With the use of transparent oranges or yellows over the tops of the contrasting lights and darks this can create quite a dramatic effect.